Solution to wildfire is more fire - on our terms" Guestview

This might be tough to read right now, just after a News Journal front-page story about a blaze threatening the Weatherstone neighborhood, but we need fire. The thing is, we need it on our terms.

As Florida burns, it’s all too clear what kind of problems wildfire presents. It’s also clear what the response is – brave men and women equipped with rakes, shovels, bulldozers, hoses, and helicopters.

A response isn’t a remedy, though. Where do we find solutions for wildfire problems? Where we find solutions to so many problems – science. In this case, fire science.

There’s too much at stake here not to equip those who manage our forests with the tools they need when the conflagrations come. The most valuable tool we can give them in the long run, though, is knowledge. With a better understanding of fire, we’re more likely to prevent it getting the upper hand on us.

Though we know that fire can be beneficial to the health of our environment, there’s much we don’t know. We need to better understand how we can use fire as a tool so it doesn’t become a terror.

Most people understand that prescribed burns reduce the likelihood of catastrophic wildfires. What’s trickier is figuring out the prescription. Do you burn on a rigid schedule, like clockwork, say every three years? Or do you do it on a variable schedule? How high do we turn up the heat? Yes, we can regulate the temperature almost like an oven, with our choice of time of day, time of year, and weather conditions.

It takes a lot experimentation to get that right. That’s where public scientists make an important contribution. They do the research that informs how we manage our forests, and the outreach that puts that knowledge into the hands of our firefighters, land managers, tree farmers, government officials, and homeowners.

The University of Florida’s Institute of Agricultural and Life Sciences, which I lead, isn’t a firefighting operation. The faculty of our School of Forest Resources and Conservation do not suit up and join the battle against the blaze.

But they are committed to helping Florida continue to be one of the world’s leading pine producers. They want to protect Floridians from wildfire-related harm to their health or their property. They don’t want wildfire to claim your favorite hiking trail, evict the game you hunt, close the road you take to work, or send you running for your inhaler (or for your life!).

Public science’s job is to address the public’s problems. That’s the broad mission of land-grant universities such as UF. Because the southeastern U.S. is now regarded by many as "woodbasket" to the world, the role of UF/IFAS takes on national importance.

In Florida alone, forests and forestry produce $16 billion a year in economic activity, and support the jobs of 80,000 Floridians.

So it’s essential to the public that we prescribe fire properly so we don’t get the kind of fire that Mother Nature sends.

The School Forest Resources and Conservation trains people in how to prescribe fires. It even trains firefighters in how to beat back wildfires.

That just gets us through the dry season, though. Forest scientists are thinking about the health of forests five years from now, 10 years from now. If we lose our beloved (and lucrative) trees to pests and disease, we suffer a different kind of burn that can be as destructive as any delivered by a flame.

So public scientists travel the world scouting for the insects that would represent the greatest threat to our pines if (and in this age of globalization, it’s really a matter of when) those get here. They apply engineering like remote sensing to monitoring vast acreage that can’t be covered on foot. They study how trees interact with animals, plants, and fungi.

This science becomes even more important when you consider that 1,000 newcomers a day make Florida their home, pushing people deeper into forests and other flammable environments in the search for available space for homes.

Firefighting gives us the hero model of response. It’s easy to understand. It yields dramatic, immediate results. Preventive science takes years, though, and develops in the obscurity of the lab or the teaching forest.

It may not be as heroic, but developing knowledge to keep our forests functioning as agents of our economy, our health, and our scenery is something we must do to manage the relationship between 20 million Floridians and 17 million acres of trees.

Jack Payne is the University of Florida’s senior vice president for agriculture and natural resources and leader of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.